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Privatizing Risk without Privatizing the Welfare State: The Hidden Politics of Social Policy Retrenchment in the United States
Abstract
Over the last decade, students of the welfare state have produced an impressive body of research on retrenchment, the dominant thrust of which is that remarkably few welfare states have experienced fundamental shifts. This article questions this now-conventional wisdom by reconsidering the post-1970s trajectory of the American welfare state, long considered the quintessential case of social policy stability. I demonstrate that although most programs have indeed resisted retrenchment, U.S. social policy has also offered increasingly incomplete risk protection in an era of dramatic social change. Although some of this disjuncture is inadvertent—an unintended consequence of the very political stickiness that has stymied retrenchment—I argue that the declining scope of risk protection also reflects deliberate and theoretically explicable strategies of reform adopted by welfare state opponents in the face of popular and change-resistant policies, a finding that has significant implications for the study of institutional change more broadly.
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“Because of pre-existing federal subsidies for employer-sponsored insurance arrangements, numerous attempts to create a national, universal health-care plan were met with failure (Hacker, 2004).”
From Policy feedback, varieties of federalism, and the politics of health‐care funding in the United States, Mexico, and Canada (2024) · cites this paper as Hacker, 2004
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Metadata
- Authors
- HACKER, J. S.
- Affiliations
- Yale University (US)
- Corresponding author
- HACKER, JACOB S.
- ORCID
- HACKER, JACOB S.
- Venue
- American Political Science Review
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press (CUP)
- Published
- 2004-05
- Volume
- 98
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 243-260
- ISSN
- 0003-0554 (ISSN-L)
- 1537-5943
- OpenAlex
- W2125398298
- Cited by
- 1,543
- References
- 99
- Citations by year
- 2026: 70 · 2025: 83 · 2024: 77 · 2023: 102 · 2022: 53 · 2021: 95 · 2020: 133 · 2019: 123 · 2018: 98 · 2017: 74 · 2016: 81 · 2015: 70 · 2014: 81 · 2013: 57 · 2012: 63
- FWCI
- 137.75
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- American Political Science Review (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Social Policy and Reform Studies
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Social Policy and Social Work in Brazil
- Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Policy Transfer and Learning
- Keywords
- welfare state retrenchment, social policy, risk protection, institutional change, social policy reform, United States welfare state, social change
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